I am a sucker for historical fiction based on fact, particularly if it involves World War II. Add to that mix, people who make their living dealing with books, such as booksellers and librarians and I will jump on the book. Alan Hlad has written just such a book. The title is The Book Spy. It …
There is just something about history that draws me in, and this novel was no different. I have read many books about World War II, but I especially loved this one as it focused on three women codebreakers at Bletchley Park. The Rose Code deals with two time periods, the first starting 1940 and the …
“I wanted people to get a good laugh out of it,” le Carré says of his new, 25th novel. Maybe I’m the wrong kind of reader; I didn’t chuckle even once, but I still enjoyed this meticulously crafted spy novel suffused with politics of all sorts. Protagonist Anatoly—“Nat” for short—is a middle-aged veteran of Britain’s …
Thank you, Frederick Forsyth, for writing The Fox. Thank you G.P. Putnam’s Sons for publishing it. The 21st century has seen the birth of a new type warfare– cyberwarfare. Mr. Forsyth has produced a book whose plot seems to be ripped from major news headlines (not “fake news!”). Among the major characters is Sir Adrian Weston, retired …
Seattle7Writers, the nonprofit collective of Pacific Northwest authors, partners with independent bookstores this summer to introduce readers to favorite authors and raise money for literacy nonprofits. In July, Island Books hosted the Seattle7Writers cookout to benefit Team Read, a nonprofit organization that pairs struggling young readers with trained teen reading coaches for one-on-one tutoring after school and …
So, you think you know the whole story about WWII? I thought I did! That was before I started reading books by Ben Macintyre: Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, and finally Double Cross. I strongly recommend all three. Agent Zigzag follows one of the first double-triple-quadruple-crossing spies that MI5 recruited during WWII. Operation Mincemeat tells the more complete story …
